Collage: Every Day Is Somebody's Birthday

Reflections On The Bus & Outside The Café

The old woman on the bus with the nasty cough
reminds me that I too am mortal...
...as if I needed reminding...

One day I will be old, perhaps...
...stooped, heavily wrinkled...
...carrying one final illness inside...

I tell myself 'So enjoy this sunny day'...
and the buildings of London (strange secretive Gothic house glimpsed as the bus glides past)
and the pretty girls
and the shadows trees drop on pavements
and the way light illuminates the corner of a block on that housing estate...

Next stop, the Royal Free hospital...
...place of pain & salvation...
...recovery & resignation...
...tragic visions of a loved-one in bed there...so vulnerable...

An old man with a heavily tattooed hand sits nearby...
...respectably dressed, though shabby...
...still rebelling, perhaps, as he did back when the needle bit
into his skin so very long ago...illustrating his youth forever...
...then he was strong, fit & full of himself, with a long future
full of bars and birds and beer and bouts of merriment with the boys...
...now his sits, silent, seeing his End, perhaps, not so far away...

We're all on the bus...
all unknowable going about our daily lives...
...the voices inside...
...glances aimed at strangers...
...brief contact - 'I'm sorry'...
...and to pass time I try to read the signs...
...the physogs & sartorial style...
...am I alone, I wonder, in concocting life stories for strangers?

Outside the café, a tanned girl in Lycra leggings...
training for what?
For Life, of course.
One needs to be fit for Life.
She makes call -
'Are you not at home?'
Another call - no answer.
She taps the keys...
texting, updating her Facebook status, tweeting, perhaps...
...it's essential that Followers & friends know what's going on...
...thoughts contrived especially for broadcast formulated on a regular basis...
...and I, in my old-fashioned way, scribble mine onto paper with a pen...

Career Opportunities

A career is wonderful, but you can't curl up with it on a cold night. - Marilyn Monroe 

He knows nothing and thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career. - George Bernard Shaw 

The Careers Officer at school got the same response I gave to everyone in authority back then - a blank look. I'd like to think I was part of 'The Blank Generation' because that would lend my apathy and cluelessness an air of cool, rebellious chic or, at least, excuse me from responsibility due to socio-cultural circumstances. But how can you brand a generation when each one will contain so many different successes and 'failures'? The Lost Generation...Generation X...Generation Y or Z according to research demographics - baloney, convenient tags for marketing types and the media....

...although Richard Hell & The Voidoids' 'Blank Generation' is still a great record...

...it came out the same year (1977) as The Clash's debut album, which contained the other seminal 'sums-up-my-life track...

...of course a career opportunity never knocked because I wasn't in. Opportunity could knock as hard as it liked, I wasn't listening. I had no talent, for anything, even knocking a tin against my head whilst 'Mule Train' played, like Bob 'The Tray' Blackman, who got his break on the TV show, Opportunity Knocks...

...and you thought Britain's Got Talent was some kind of atrocity exhibition peculiar to this generation with it's stupid novelty acts. Mind you, I'd rather watch Bob than another woman dancing with a dog.

I found this game, Careers, by Waddington, in a charity shop the other week. Yes, from the makers of Monopoly (they cornered the market in finance-based boards games, didn't they?), this 1957 fun-for-some-of-the-family concept shows its age wonderfully by offering an opportunity to join a moon expedition. Note that the chance to enter Politics comes with expenses paid, in case you thought that the expenses scandal was something new. The board was sold seperately, but even with that I couldn't have played because the box contained no money - ha-ha - the irony! Yes, that suits my non-career life perfectly.

Toothpaste For Outer Space

Riding the crest of the space-age wave, no achievement is too big to be brought back down to Earth in order to promote your product. God bless Crest for helping Neil, Buzz and Michael to keep their teeth clean! One small step for man...one giant leap for sales of Crest?

How To Make Electronic (Tape) Music With Barry Gray

Here's Barry Gray, creator of music for Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet, UFO and Space: 1999, telling kids how to make 'electronic music' with their tape recorders - what fun! It's from the TV Century 21 annual, 1965. It wouldn't have been easy to find someone to 'play a weird chord' on the piano, though, unless your family were musical. 

One of my earliest memories is of the old piano in our house being carried outside and smashed to pieces - that's how musical my family were. They were so avant-garde that traditional instruments were to be destroyed and my father bought a synthesizer as soon as Robert Moog's machine was available. What a racket he made! There was I trying to watch Thunderbirds whilst Mum read the latest Catherine Cookson so we'd both scream 'SHUT UP!' None of that's true, of course, except the smashing of the piano...and Mum reading Catherine Cookson.

So not only were kids being presented visions of the future courtesy of Gerry Anderson but they were also encouraged to splice tape together and make their own space age music - wonderful! Don't forget, if you borrowed the tape recorder don't forget to return it as you found it...

Galaxie - Space-Age Plumbing Fixtures

1964.

Sit on Venus! Bath in Neptune! Galaxie...for all your interplanetary plumbing needs. Brought to you by...U/R? Mike Banks travels back in time to pursue a more profitable career, perhaps....

Danse Macabre - 15th & 16th Century Images of Death and Music

Death and the gentleman (Dance of the Dead), Heinrich Knoblochzer,  1490

Death and the notables (Dance of the Dead), Jacob Meydenbach, 1492

The orchestra of death (Dance of the Dead), Heinrich Knoblochzer, 1490

Orchestra of the dead (Liber Chronicarum), Michael Wolgemut, 1493

Dance orchestra of death (La grant danse macabre des hommes et des femme),
 Nicolas Le Rouge, 1496

Pope and Cardinal (Dance of Death), Nikolaus Manuel, 1515

Imagines Mortis, Hans Holbein the Younger, 1547

Take It Easy - Jackie Gleason's Music For Lovers Only

'...no percussian (sic) to jar the romantic effect.' - D.R. Schryer (Amazon)

'Close your eyes as you listen to his warm, mellow strains.' -  Steve R. (Amazon)

'This music is pefect (sic) to calm the nerves of post wwII vets.' - Greg Corlew (Amazon)

'THE MUSIC OF COURSE IS TOP NOTCH, IT IS NOT MUSZAC (sic) OF ELEVATOR MUSIC. UNFORTUNATELY, NO ONE UNDER 40 WOULD EVEN KNOW ALBUMS LIKE THESE EXIST ...IT'S TO THEIR DETRIMENT AND OF COURSE, I BLAME THE RADIO PROGRAMERS....BUT THAT'S ANOTHER STORY.' - daddyojazz (Amazon)

Yes, 'daddyo', it is indeed tragic that no-one under 40 would even know this album exists, and radio programmers should wake up to the fact that there's a huge demand for some Gleason gloss to smooth over the cracks of contemporary life. What better medicine for modern traumas than Music For Lovers Only - it should be available on prescription...although in the UK, if you're working, that could cost about £6 at the chemists and you can buy it for about £3 on-line...

...mind you, if you're single, divorced, or have lost a loved-one, this LP could cause terrible depression, so perhaps it is best that it's prescribed by doctors...just to be on the safe side.

A vinyl find (£2) to add to my collection of classic covers (see more by clicking on the Album Covers tag). Two cigarettes hardly smoked...a trace of lipstick on one...but where are the lovers? Did they get no further than one drag each before passion took over, propelling them to the bedroom? Or are they merely kissing? Does he now have the key to her heart? It seems the cigarettes will smoulder forever...trapped in time, a moment of romantic bliss...the ecstasy of anticipation...when nicotine indulgence could be enjoyed without warnings of death by addiction emblazoned on the packets...

What did Jackie Gleason actually do on all his albums? There's some debate, but his trumpeter, Bobby Hackett, provided the best response: 'He brought the cheques.' In another quote, though, Hackett attributed Gleason with amazing musical ears in his capacity as a conductor. This album remains a record-breaker by spending 153 weeks in the Billboard Top Ten, so Jackie brought some good-looking cheques.

Play It Again, Sam?

'Now that's a film I could watch again,' says LJ, holding a copy of Blade Runner (more on that here), and that's high praise from a woman who seldom re-watches anything - The Thomas Crown Affair, yes, because Steve McQueen, so handsome, so well-dressed, reminds her of me...so I like to think. And The Shining, not only because it's a masterpiece but also because Jack Torrance's displeasure at being interrupted whilst writing also reminds her of me, I suspect.

Talk of films we can watch repeatedly made me consider how, or if, they differ from those we consider to be Great, as in the ones we list when asked to name The Greatest Films Ever Made (a common question put to this renowned cultural critic). For the Greatest list we may be tempted to include films that are highly regarded by esteemed critics just to prove how cultured we are. I say 'we', by which I mean 'you', because I would never do such a thing! Oh no, I shamelessly include every Die Hard film, American Pie...Jean-Claude Van Damme's best, to name but a few...which is why I'm regarded as a great cultural critic.

There are films I marvel at and those I watch repeatedly. Take Citizen Kane, which I've seen twice, and Touch Of Evil, which I've seen countless times. You know which one frequently makes the Greatest Films of All Time list. I've watched Tarkovsky's Stalker twice, but No Country For Old Men at least five times. Yet I'm aware of how amazing Stalker is...so much so that my theory is that I'm saving it for when my mind is prepared to be blown again. Casablanca is cinematic chocolate, of course (70% cocoa or Cadbury's milk? The choice is yours), which I'll happily gorge on any time.

OK, I'm lazy, perhaps, although I don't think Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye is exactly a populist choice, and I watched it so many times one year that I had to have the theme song surgically removed from my head. Apocalypse Now is a whore ('C'mon, big boy, I got sexy music, hot dialogue and dirty action') and I fall for it every time it beckons. So common! Yes, you intellectuals may scoff, but when Coppola struts his stuff (you know the films) I'm on the floor begging for it. Likewise Kubrick, who's pretty much the king of Watch Again in our cave. At least he has serious cred, whilst also supplying spectacle. Alien is another that I can't shake off, parasitically chewing up all attempts to watch Clever Films as it does before forcing me to view again. Whilst on holiday recently I even started to watch it in German and would have continued if LJ had not pointed out the absurdity of what I was doing.

So, for me, there are definite Favourites and then there are Classics (official). Perhaps you have them too. It's an ability to appreciate and enjoy genius whilst preferring to watch others more often, which is not to say that the two never coincide (Kubrick springs to mind). Now, should I watch No Country For Old Men again soon? I'll spin a coin...

Collage: Happiest Thing That Ever Happened To Breakfast

The Sixth Palace of Hell, Fay Pomerance, 1945

Lilith on the shoulders of Lucifer, appearing to a dying man.

Rip Rig & Panic - Storming The Reality Asylum

I didn't want to write this...I had to write this...

Anarcho-funksters, Jazz-punk pranksters, avant-garde groovers, jesters in the court of Jazz...Rip Rig & Panic...

...time is a trick of the mind, as Neneh Cherry sings on Storm The Reality Asylum, but 30 years really have passed since they closed the gates of their sound asylum - unbelievable - and now that Cherry Red have reissued all three albums I'm drawn back inside one more time, reluctantly, because what happened cannot be recaptured in words...

...the Soho Brasserie...on the wall in the hallways is a small poster featuring Jack Kerouac advertising a night called The Hot Sty run by Rip Rig & Panic - of course we went - there Michael Jackson rubbed shoulders on the decks with Duke Ellington - that's all I remember - that and thinking 'This is the best club I've ever been to'...

...memory fades...their gigs were memorable but time dims the details, then erases them completely...anarchic, naturally, the chaos only just controlled enough to play everything properly, as in honestly, recognisable - they did The Tightrope all right - now it looks as if their whole lifespan was one tightrope walk...

...on the horizon in 1981, the Jazz Revival (official) - meanwhile, here's this mob farting in the faces of everyone who wanted to be Cool, their very core comprising of Roland Kirk - Rip Rig & Panic, a perfect name - rip up self-imposed formalities and hopefully spread panic amongst the squares - it was all about putting on the squares, just as hipsters did back when Kerouac was getting his Jazz fix - and if Rip Rig & Panic spoke some jive talk when interviewed, their true language was more akin to Dada - whilst others were knee deep in Political shit, they pushed their own red button and went nuclear on everything - your ass has got to go somewhere, so why not free your mind and let it follow...

...if Punk Rock was anti-music, Rip Rig & Panic were pro-professionalism as if played by free-spirited kids - the joy of instruments as toys, with Gareth Sager's saxophone wailing somewhere between Gato Barbieri and Albert Ayler and Mark Springer's piano strung out on the spirit of Cecil Taylor and Keith Jarrett (right down to some of his vocalising)...

...right, we'd never heard anything like it, and those older heads who could spot the influences probably hated the sound of their idols being disrespected...it was one big middle finger to po-faced reverence and if you didn't get the spirit of the thing, tough...

...has it all dated? No, but it dates us, the listeners who heard it first time 'round - and it revives us too because the Rip Rig & Panic experience was one of a revival meeting - sing 'Hallelujah!' - in a demented church of holy rollers speaking in tongues, possessed by the spirits of Ayler, Monk, Taylor, Sun Ra, Mingus et al - Howl! - I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by post-Punk disillusionment and Rip Rig & Panic's trick was to offer redemption for lost souls low on idealism by saying balls to all that, lets build our own world...one which reflects that one outside...filled with madness and yes, even joy...

The Big Book Of Space (World Distributors Ltd 1956)

'Only six hours to spend on the moon, and so much to do!' I spent six hours book-hunting in Brighton recently but didn't find much apart from this, unearthed in a dusty basement and mine for 20p. The illustrator isn't credited and although the style is simple that's what's so great about it, that and the colours, of course. We have lift off!

Michel Magne - Musique Tachiste (Cacophonic)

'Perfection is naturally my first prerogative - without compromise', said Magne in the original sleeve notes from 1957. Ah, the idealism of youth - still, why not aim high? Musique Tachiste is full of wonders and almost perfect. The first six tracks vary in mood and content; the opening Mémoire D'un Trou being especially impressive with it's use of the cimbalom. Self Service would sound like a chirpy soundtrack for a motorway café ad if not for the disruptive pounding percussion and effects which lend a frantic atmosphere, as if a riot is about to ensue due to the quality of the soup....which, let's face it, is unlikely in France, but quite probable on the M4.

Magne uses concrète effects more formally than his fellow countrymen working with tape, so we get water running throughout Carillon Dans L'eau Bouillante whilst strings rise and descend to disorientating effect. The closing three-part Concertino is a treat, marrying sometimes discordant strings with Jazz sections (Paul Castanier on piano is superb) that swerve towards Third Stream cool but the arrangement is progressive. The first movement features the laughter of a small crowd, as if Magne predicts the response of conservative ears to this adventurous recording, whilst also having a good chuckle himself.

Cacophonic is an imprint of Finders Keepers

Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza ‎– Musica Su Schemi

I found the book, Magnificent obsessions. Persol, cinema and craftsmanship today (details here). It contains great photos of Ennio Morricone that are new to me. There he is, the man with the horn, the avant-mainstream maestro, maker of both soundtracks that even cloth-eared idiots know and member of Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza. I can't think of another musician who's suceeded in such extremes of music. Perhaps you can 'cause you're smarter than me.

So I've got the book and I'm on the bus home flicking through the latest edition of The Wire when I come across a review of  Musica Su Schemi because it's been reissued by Superior Viaduct. So that's my excuse for featuring it here. If you don't know G.I.N.C's music this album might be a better place to start. Saying that, I don't mean to underestimate your ability to take in purely improvised music, honest. Don't get me wrong, my collection's not packed with free-form avant-garde sounds featuring players tooting and hooting as they feel like it - no sir.

Since there's no immediate wow factor here you have to allow it to worm it's way into your brain. To do so, I suggest you put it on repeat and get on with whatever you want to do...the ironing...washing up...writing that post-modern non-linear novel you keep saying you'll write...whatever. You know the score...there isn't one, although I read that G.I.N.C use chess 'to define key parameters of their music' - the brainiacs! If that seems to promise studiously technical compositions the actual results are anything but. 'Omaggio A Giacinto Scelsi', in particular, grows organically from a quietly ominous drone into a dark vortex which sucks in your soul and spits it out again, fully nourished yet not quite sane.

Alberich - Machine Gun Nest: Cassette Works, Vol. 0 (Hospital Productions)

Machine Gun Nest: Cassette Works, Vol. 0 - what a bleedin' racket - ear-bleeding racket - so much so that the workman in the street who was drilling as if trying to compete gave up - ha! Kris Lapke, Hospital's engineer, knows how to fine-tune electronic fire, spraying audio lead all over us...and we like it, well, I do, when I'm in the mood.

And sure enough, art imitated Life (or the other way 'round) when 'Image Of Progress' just happened to play whilst the workman was still tearing up the tarmac. It's one of the best tracks on this compilation - that's very best, not just one I happen to like because it doesn't contain the rabid Dalek vocals, although that's true too. When Lapke exterminates legibility vocal-wise, perhaps that's a good thing. He may, after all, just be ranting about how his Mum pissed him off by refusing to take that basket of washing...though that seems unlikely.

So the Vatican Shadow/Alberich axis of power continues to perpetrate sonic war crimes against all that is saccharine and blood-sucking about modern Pop. If their means and mythology lack subtlety, they make up for that by brutally forceful deployment.

Another piece of music featuring machine-gun imagery...and the acoustic equivalent of Alberich in the form of Peter Brotzmann's saxophone-as-heavy-artillery...

The Chuangmei Exhibition

We (yes, the royal 'we') took part in an exhibition recently, the centrepiece of which was the mysterious entity called Chuangmei...

You'll not glean much from that photo so I suggest you read all about it here to gain a clearer understanding of it's purpose/nature/significance..........meaning...................etc............

The event was held in an exclusive high-rise gallery which doubles as the dwelling place of the hostess, Geraldine, who kindly demonstrated the anatomical workings of Chuangmei, thus increasing our admiration and amazement at this bio-mechanoid phenomenon.

Contributors were invited to participate in any way they wanted to, which resulted in such diverse elements as Origami, and a delightfully savage tongue-in-cheek rant from our friend, James DC, without whom we would still be trapped in the Escheresque tower since he lead us out.

Here is one of my pieces that were shown...

And here's one of LJ's...

Boards Of Canada - Tomorrow's Harvest (Warp)

Boards of Canada obviously need some help publicising this, their second album in 27 years (or something), and knowing how influential this blog is I'm only happy to oblige. 

You probably don't know that BoC consists of two men. I think they're Scottish. They don't do many interviews, a fact that has gained them a following so devoted that should Michael Sandison and Marcus Eoin urge them all to commit suicide on June 28, they would. 

Previous to the release of Tomorrow's Harvest a 12" was released (only two, or perhaps ten), one of which recently sold on eBay for £251,000 and 3 pence (congratulations, you are the highest bidder! It sure pays to add those extra odd pence)...something like that. Also, the duo set up a Da Vinci Code-like labyrinth of links which, once found and configured, allowed the online sleuth to be able to download this album which, by the way, is also encrypted with subliminal messages that reveal the true meaning of Jack Vettriano's Dance Me to the End of Love (something to do with the alignment of the figures correlating to certain stars which in turn, when translated into the page numbers of The Necronomicon reveal  an evil alliance between The Pope and Primark). True.

Imagine my surprise, nay, queasy horror, when ascending from the bowels of London Town the other day I saw an advert for this album slide past me on the escalator! I am now officially part of...something...the mainstream? Surely not! Not I, who takes such pride in being a purveyor of 'outsider' electronica like Daft Punk and The Chemical Brothers - no-o-o-o! I've sold out! I have succumbed to the lure of listening to what other people listen to instead of artists like Ekoplekz and Vatican Shadow (OK, a few other people listen to them, but I've never met one, and the fact that I have no friends and never go out has nothing to do with it).

Have Boards of Canada caught up with recent musical history or vice versa? After all, in today's Guardian interview  it's suggested that labels such as Ghost Box have been mining the same H****ological terrain since 9BoC, along with others. Yes, we all know that sampling 70s Horror (in the case of UK artists, cult kiddies TV) and referencing Italian slasher films has been de rigueur for years now. Have BoC been listening to Pye Corner Audio? Martin Jenkins surely listened to BoC. I'll be honest, the whole world seems have to listened avidly to BoC whilst these ears have been unimpressed, or at least never impressed enough to hail them as geniuses. You have to be a genius, after all, the be allowed out of the electronica ghetto and into the BBC studios for the John Peel show...don't you?

Fact is BoC show their age on a few tracks here by using some beats that they seem to have found down the back of the sofa in their rural recording studio ('Nothing Is Real'), and 'Sundown' is pure New Age cheese (get out of that country shack and into the city gutter, boys!) which, if played to anyone blind would not  be recognised as the work of Great Electronic Artists. Then again, perhaps they're be knowingly cheesy by recreating the mood of a John Carpenter cue to accompany a lull in slashing and shooting. 

'Come To Dust' is already a big record at sunset on beaches all over Ibiza and others will surely be used on the next series of Top Gear (as '1969' from Geogaddi was, apparently). I look forward to Monty Don sewing Hydrangeas on Gardeners' World to the sound of 'New Seeds'. Smart, really, pimping your tracks to anyone, thus buying more time in the studio.

I've been enjoying a fair chunk of this album, you'll be surprised to learn, but the pleasure diminishes with each play, which is a weird circumstance considering it's usually the other way around. Familiarity breeds contempt? They should have pushed themselves more. Instead, the track sequence suggests two middle-aged blokes starting out all full of vim and vigour before slumping, exhausted from their efforts and saying 'Oh, fuck it, that'll do' when age takes over. I know the feeling because I get it when trying to run round the block and grinding to a halt halfway up the third street. Boards of Canada also only get three-quarters 'round the block, but they've presumably had a lot more time to prepare.

Beynon Archival - Works From The Beynon School Of Audio Architecture

'The Beynon School was founded in 1941 by Victor Beynon as an institution extolling the virtues of alternative education. The children aged between 11 and 19 attended the school in the heart of the Devon countryside up until it's closure on the 29th April 1980.

The Beynon School of Audio Architecture was the department founded in 1959 to explore the relationship between new ever emerging audio possibilities (performative electronics, composition, structure, early sampling techniques) and the moving image. This experimentation peaked in the mid 1960s to the late 1970s. This is the time span that forms the bulk of the surviving archive. The word 'Architecture' was employed because of Victor's ideology that the children should 'build worlds in relation to visual stimulus that are both organic and solid but at once metaphorical and dream-like'. A scope that gave some focus while remaining wide enough to encourage experimentation. The school was also a focus for the surrounding community and the local inhabitants made use of the facilities of the school and the audio school proper. Some even adding to the archive.

After Victor's death in 1992, I, his grandson Gregory inherited the archive and set about exploring its contents. The great majority of the audio-visual archive was destroyed by flooding in 1986 when the archive was being held at the Royal William Yard, Plymouth. However most of the audio material was saved as it was stored above the line of the highest part of the flooding.

In September 1976 Victor wrote the Penguin published book 'The Beynon School of Audio Architecture' celebrating the school, it's ideology and it's endeavours. The book enjoyed a short but none-the-less popular publishing run.

During the 1980s after the schools closure the department and it's associated contents relocated to a location on Dartmoor National Park near to the village of Widecombe. Recording and experimentation continued for a short while until 1989 when the department sold it's assets and closed it's doors.

I sincerely hope you enjoy what you hear. These recordings reflect both the times and culture in which they were made while retaining the quality of externalising these young peoples internal worlds; for better or for worse.

It is with a degree of regret that some of the archive cannot be accurately dated due to the deterioration of some of the labelling attached to the recorded medium. Time will ravish us all eventually.

Some of what is presented will be the work of Beynon Archival (Mr. G. Beynon) and its associates.

Mr. G. Beynon. Lead Archivist.'

I've looked for Victor Beynon's book but to no avail. It must be incredibly rare. Perhaps it will turn up as a PDF one day. Meanwhile, these audio experiments from the 70s continue the tradition of UK DIY experimentation by such electronic music luminaries as Fred Judd and Daphne Oram, whom Beynon must have known.

Amazingly, most of this material predicts what's now known as Hauntology (musical). 'The Copse is Wrought Iron', from 1977, is a prime example of the kind of distressed broadcast from the past that the kids go crazy for, these days. Whilst most transmissions are of an abstract nature (typically considering the free-thinking creativity of the young), 'Bishop's Lament' differs in that it is a simple rendition of Neil Young's 'Only Love Can Break Your Heart', albeit recorded in what sounds like a steel factory, perhaps on a school trip. Since kids today also like nothing better than to prostrate themselves before the Satanic sound altar of artists like Demdike Stare, Regina Back's untitled piece fits the bill perfectly. It is, after all, nothing less than Dr Phibes re-imagined for an Italian horror flick that would do Gianni Mazza proud.

Unlike many music class recordings, these suggest the nightmares of post-pubescent insecurity rather than playful frolics through green fields. There's no pastoral whimsy here, but instead, the sometimes pain-racked portraits of youth in turmoil during the dying years of heavy industry, and union conflict. One can almost imagine these some of these sounds being dreamt up by candlelight during power strikes...flickering shadows feeding the imaginations of those involved.

As sonic archaeological finds go, this is real treasure.




Buy it (digital) here. Only £4

Picasso Sculpture In Chicago, 1967

50 feet high...162 tons...built at U.S. Steel's American Bridge division then disassembled and taken to Chicago. Picasso declined an offer of $100,000 for the design